Oh, I have a pretty good idea of what touch does, thankyouverymuch :-)

And strangely enough, my man for touch doesn't mention the side effect of touch which is relevant here.

But the point is that the script looks for a directory (google* man bash) which obviously won't be there (you having renamed it) -- so what is the point of creating a regular file of the same name?

Anywayz, thanks geekmaster, that's sort of what I thought -- that something else is trying to force it back into ad-supported mode, and the file thwarts it. Except on my kindle it worked (and continues to work) without the file (5.0.4).

* if you don't have at least one instance of bash open on your desktop...

*nix nit ...
On the Kindle, you are not running Bash, you are running Ash.

On most distributions:
/bin/busybox ash
will get you an instance of the Ash command line shell.

(Most distributions have it installed because their "create initramfs" tools need it.)

Since you can't create two file or directory with the same name in the same directory. ( Try on your PC)

Just as a P.S., for completion / clarification: because a FILE with the given name already exists, that existing file can neither be read (=interpreted) as a DIRECTORY, nor can a directory with the same name be created.

Since you can't create two file or directory with the same name in the same directory. ( Try on your PC)

Actually you can (sort of).

The USB drive is vfat, which is not sensitive to case, which means that "FILE.TXT" and "file.txt" should be the same file.

On my kindle with SSH, I created two files named file.txt and FILE.TXT. Both existed, and both were visible from windows, but good luck opening the second instance of what windows sees as the same filename.

Depending on what tool used, a windows disk repair tool would probably report that as an error.

I was able to delete this "file" from windows (twice).

This is actually a bug in the kindle. It should be smart enough to know that a vfat is not case sensitive.